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Daily Archives: February 15, 2013

* AllThingsD.com’s contract with News Corp. ends at year’s end. Potential buyers are already calling. (reuters.com)* Why Elon Musk vs. New York Times won’t end well for Tesla. (mashable.com) | (pandodaily.com)
* A new strategy? CNN is virtually all Poop Cruise, all the time. (time.com) | Drudge notices it, too. (politico.com) | A ratings win for CNN. (mediabistro.com)
* New York Times profiles Ben Smith, “the boy wonder of BuzzFeed.” (nytimes.com)
* The new New Republic is different from the old, but not as different as Marty Peretz thinks. (capitalnewyork.com)
* Facebook: Our systems were targeted in a sophisticated attack last month. (facebook.com)
* “House of Cards” character may not be a good journalist, but she’s a good career-climber. (hollywoodreporter.com)* Michael Wolff (right) loses Twitter followers after appearing on HuffPost Live. (huffingtonpost.com)
* Video ads are getting longer, and people are apparently okay with that. (allthingsd.com)
* Chicago’s Fox affiliate pulls a bait-and-switch on Facebook. (timeoutchicago.com)
* Who’s sending fake lesbian wedding announcements to small papers? (gawker.com)

There are four stories on the front page of today’s Miami Herald and three have Hannah Sampson bylines.

How the heck did that happen?

Hannah tells Romenesko readers:

I don’t want to bore you with too many details, but I’ll just break down how yesterday went (it was a Very Long Day).

Three 1A bylines are definitely a record for me; my previous record was two solo bylines on the front last April, and I was a total dork about how excited that made me. But I was not alone in cranking those stories out yesterday. I wrote the Presidents’ Day tourism story and American Airlines merger piece, but I had help on the latter. My editor, Jane Wooldridge, and one of our interns, Maria LaMagna, gave me feeds from passengers at the airport and industry experts that I wove into the piece, and we also had input from the Public Insight Network.

For the Carnival story, Jane and Rochelle Koff (who works in Tallahassee) did all the heavy lifting and writing. I was just an assist on that one — I’ve been covering it since earlier in the week — but they were gracious enough to include me in the byline.

I was involved in all those stories because I cover tourism for the business section, a beat that includes cruise lines, airlines and hotels. It just so happened that Thursday was extraordinarily busy on all those fronts and the editors decided each of those stories warranted 1A placement. While the beat keeps me busy, this was definitely not a typical day (thank goodness)!

Lee Enterprises, which has given huge raises and bonuses to its CEO, just laid off the executive editor at its paper in Provo, Utah. (Nine days ago, Lee laid off 10% of the Daily Herald’s workforce.)
Randy Wright, the pink-slipped executive editor, had been with the paper for 11 years.

I phoned Lee headquarters in Davenport to get a comment about the layoffs, knowing that they would (again!) duck my call. A secretary told me this morning that communications vice president Dan Hayes was “unavailable,” and news vice president Joyce Dehli “is in a meeting and is pretty booked up today.” I also left a message for Provo Daily Herald publisher Rona Rahlf.

Lee, which owns the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and many other papers, is in such terrible shape that even Warren Buffett — one of the few investors who still likes newspapers — is distancing himself from the company.

We are disappointed with the reaction to our request, which we felt was with the best intentions to help study issues affecting Maine through an analysis of publicly available data. We will continue our reporting, but will use other sources of information to do so.

——

Republican legislators in Maine called an “emergency press conference” Thursday to blast the Bangor Daily News for seeking information about concealed weapons permit owners. The paper says its request is part of a two-year long reporting project on domestic violence and drug abuse, and that it “has no intention to release this information publicly.”

We intend to use this information, along with other information we are gathering, to analyze possible correlations and trends relevant to our reporting projects. It had always been the BDN’s intent to request this information to support our reporting projects. However, the introduction of legislation to remove these permits from public records accelerated our timeline in doing so.

The paper emphasizes that it’s not going to do what the Journal News did — anger locals by publishing the names and addresses of gun permit holders.”We recognize how sensitive this information is,” says BDN news and new media director Anthony Ronzio. “We believe the wholesale publication of permit holder information, as was done recently by a newspaper in New York, is irresponsible.”

State Republicans want the Daily News to withdraw its open records request.

“Maine people expect much more than this out of one of their major daily newspapers,” said Senate Minority Leader Michael Thibodeau. “This is beneath the Bangor Daily News to engage in this activity in my opinion, and we would encourage them to abandon this process and let us go about our work,” trying to keep concealed weapons permit information secret.